The old woman didn't look old. She looked ageless. She practiced diligent skincare her whole life. "Aging with an elegant grace," she was known for saying, though privately she'd always feared the end.

  Setting down her stylus and tablet with trembling fingers, she laid her head back on the hospital pillow. It's done. All changed. Her stomach twisted—it wasn't what he wanted. Had she betrayed him?

  No. She just couldn't let him go. If anyone could beat the odds, it was him... wasn't it? She hoped she picked good options, but what if she'd chosen wrong?

  "He'll just have to forgive me," she whispered, tapping an icon on her tablet, then hesitating before the final press.

  "We're... we're ready now."

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  Looking at her husband in the next bed, she smiled through tears as her eyes drifted closed.

  ●●●

  A robot was sprinting through the barren hellscape of a shattered city. It was a wreck. Shredded metal. Catastrophic damage. Should've been scrapped years ago. Parts cobbled together like a nightmare jigsaw puzzle.

  The torso looked like an industrial washing machine reject, control panel dangling by frayed wires. Knobs jutting at obscene angles. One arm bulged grotesquely while the other hung limp, fingers frozen in a fist. Every inch screamed destruction with metal peeled back like flayed skin, corrosion eating through joints. Still, it ran.

  Its core remained pristine, the soul inside clinging with desperate fury. Not just expensive—obscenely valuable. The kind that gets you hunted, gutted, dissected. The kind that had death racing behind it now.

  It skidded around a corner, confronting a street violently ripped open, sewers gaping below like a throat. Suicide, its systems screamed. The howls of its pursuers sliced through its calculations. No choice. It hurled itself into darkness.